Bagehot

A plague on their House

British distrust for politicians is peculiarly dangerous

DURING the general election of 1959, the prime minister Harold Macmillan undertook a spot of campaigning in Rochester and Chatham, a marginal seat. It was a strikingly deferential business. For a mile or two, the Conservative candidate, Julian Critchley, was permitted to ride in his party leader's car, “not daring to speak”. Gesturing languidly at Rochester's cathedral and castle, Macmillan murmured “very fine”. Leaving the car to mount a portable platform, he added, “Beastly things, elections”, before asking a clutch of bewildered housewives “not to let Labour ruin it”. Then he was gone. Sir Julian (as he later became) was elected to a House of Commons filled with sleek old Tories in Old Etonian or Brigade of Guards ties, seemingly all called Charlie and all related to each other, he later recalled.

Quite a lot of MPs were cads and bounders, even then: there were scandals over the selling of honours and dubious party donations throughout the 20th century; conflicts of interest were rife. But for a long time, British deference—and its more wholesome, less class-based cousin, public trust—kept MPs safe. That deference was already waning when Sir Julian entered politics. Today, after years of bitter revelations about MPs and “sleaze”, voter trust is in catastrophic shape.

The causes are many. Recent ones include a sense that the Iraq war was mis-sold, parliamentary-expenses scandals and a slew of memoirs by Tony Blair and his allies, casually admitting their long-held belief that Gordon Brown—the man they had publicly backed for re-election as prime minister weeks before—was more or less a dangerous lunatic. The Christmas break was marked by fresh headlines about hypocrisy, after the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper, secretly recorded Liberal Democrat ministers saying mildly disobliging things about their Tory coalition partners.

The result is corrosive cynicism. Fully 40% of voters told the latest British Social Attitudes Survey that they “almost never” trust any of their governments to put the national interest first (just 11% said the same in 1987); 60% “almost never” trust politicians to tell the truth. British voters are not alone, of course, in wondering how much faith to put in their elected representatives. Lots of countries have developed coping mechanisms to oil the squeaking wheels of democracy. Yet it is doubtful that such methods could work in Britain.

One successful strategy is to employ broadly honest politicians in conditions of near-total transparency. Alas this happy ploy is more or less confined to countries such as Sweden, where ministers resign for forgetting to pay television-licence fees, and members of parliament perch in tiny, state-owned bedsits while working in the capital: 72% of Danes and 66% of Swedes duly told a 2010 Eurobarometer poll they trusted national parliaments. Less attractive (but effective) lubricants for democracy include patronage, pork-barrel spending and special-interest voting.

Deference, the coping mechanism now spurned in Britain, lives on in a surprising number of places, happily co-existing with a generalised contempt for politicians. One quick test involves pondering how likely a senior politician, or even a member of his family, is to face a parking ticket. In parts of southern Europe, even lowly backbenchers enjoy limousines and drivers. In America, where voters are terrifically rude about Congress in the abstract, individual congressmen and senators still enjoy considerable fawning and swan about in cars with special number plates. Fit such plates to British MPs' cars, and their paintwork would be scratched within minutes.

The blatant distribution of pork is also hazardous in Britain, a heavily centralised country with a ferocious press. Reporting from Tennessee some years ago, Bagehot was left slack-jawed on entering Knoxville's titchy yet lavish airport, which boasts a giant indoor replica of a Smoky Mountain stream, complete with real trees, 18,000 gallons of water, boulders and a wooden sculpture of a bear. A local cheerfully explained: Knoxville's congressman was chairman of the House of Representative's aviation subcommittee. A British transport secretary would be running a risk to demand a new bus station in his constituency.

Don't cut in line

In too much of Europe, though voters resent it, they know that the right political contacts are needed to land government contracts, a job for a child at the state airline or public broadcaster, or senior posts at a university or hospital. Cynicism can also be muted by tribal loyalties, especially where voting systems lead to permanent government by coalition. It is no coincidence that the wildest examples of corruption are found in parties that exist solely to defend the interests of a homogeneous regional, ethnic or language group. Minority-interest voting does happen in parts of Britain, but most MPs are elected on national platforms. Finally, British distrust of the European Union closes off a common strategy for continental voters who despair of their domestic rulers: placing their hopes in the EU as a technocratic deus ex machina, which will one day form a union deep enough to save them.

Why are the British so unusually hostile to clientelism? It is not that they are a nation of angels. Perhaps it is because they are great queuers, roused to special fury by anyone cutting in line. Political sleaze often resembles a form of queue-jumping, whether it involves pork, special favours for loyalists, jobs for cronies, or the maintenance of a grandee's lifestyle at the public's expense. No wonder such misconduct arouses white-hot anger.

The current British mood is unusually lethal: to simplify, it mixes Sicilian levels of cynicism with a Swedish rage for transparency, in a country that no longer does deference. That is a combination that has never been tried before. It would be a grave mistake to think this crisis of trust will blow over.